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.

> ... European governments are big advocates of privacy.

Maybe, but not where "national security" matters.

Edit: Added quotes for clarity.

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.

Agreed.

What about the TPP, which is backed by many corporations?

Corporations aren't _good_, they just have goals that doesn't entirely intersect with those of the government.

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"?