I'm currently watching The Wire (Season 2). One thing I'm learning is that the common citizen really does not matter at all - the three different branches of the government keep each other in check by alternatively trying to fuck each other over/brownnose each other as much as they can.
That's the genius of checks and balances. As long as no one branch (legislative, judicial, executive) gets the upper hand, we can ensure that the power-hungry people who rise up through the ranks will hold each other accountable, if only for selfish and corrupt reasons.
I'm not sure what to consider corporations though. They seem to have piled up enough legal protection to be considered a fourth, private wing of government. Some of their incentives align (no taxes, bailouts, less regulation) but many more do not. Google and Apple control enough cash and information that they are de facto more powerful than 95% of world governments, and they play a major role in ours. Eric Schmidt taking on a role at the Pentagon is one recent example [1].
As Dostoevsky put it, viper will eat viper. We are all a little Karamazovian - of the black root. It's what keeps the world balanced.
Corporations are part of the checks and balances as well. Most of the opposition to SOPA/PIPA came from the tech industry, they've united to fight the FBI decryption challenge, and they started encrypting everything in response to the NSA revelations. On the flip side, the FTC is continually butting heads with Google over what are acceptable advertising statutes, human rights groups love to expose Apple's use of sweatshops, and European governments are big advocates of privacy.
The genius of democratic capitalism is that it's managed to harness the natural desire of sociopaths to fuck each other over to ensure that life doesn't get too miserable for ordinary people. The unfortunate part is that you pretty much have to become a sociopath to enter the class that gets to decide who gets fucked. But I'd much rather have this than every other social system, where the sociopaths fuck over the common people unchecked.
Very few countries have reasons to fear for their 'national security', that's mostly just a fig leaf for activities that would otherwise not stand a chance of being implemented.
Countries that have legitimate national security issues (Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria and so on) are not the ones using that term the most frequent.
But the intelligence community is an invisible meta branch. Corporations have always been a part of the MIC, as their integral connections to the military, our largest consumer of our resources, is a host-parasite relationship and it is this relationship which has co-opted the idea of freedom in this country.
Now we have a spiral of oligarchs who leach off the whole system.
> As Dostoevsky put it, viper will eat viper. We are all a little Karamazovian - of the black root. It's what keeps the world balanced.
This is why I'm not too sad anymore when I hear all this awful news. We are all monsters. Give the average person money and power, and they will behave just the same.
So firstly, I don't think that's actually a documentary.
Secondly, are you really saying "living in a police state is fine, you just have to make sure you never become more of a threat to someone in power than their peers in government"?
That's the genius of checks and balances. As long as no one branch (legislative, judicial, executive) gets the upper hand, we can ensure that the power-hungry people who rise up through the ranks will hold each other accountable, if only for selfish and corrupt reasons.
I'm not sure what to consider corporations though. They seem to have piled up enough legal protection to be considered a fourth, private wing of government. Some of their incentives align (no taxes, bailouts, less regulation) but many more do not. Google and Apple control enough cash and information that they are de facto more powerful than 95% of world governments, and they play a major role in ours. Eric Schmidt taking on a role at the Pentagon is one recent example [1].
As Dostoevsky put it, viper will eat viper. We are all a little Karamazovian - of the black root. It's what keeps the world balanced.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head...