You would likely find my opinions quite liberal. And I am telling you, I believe there needs to be a balance. Financial corporations with insufficient government oversight gave us a banking crisis last decade that nearly ruined the nation (and, funny, for some reason there aren't a thousand finance company executives in jail over that - there absolutely should be).
It wasn't insufficient government oversight that caused that problem. The government created a fertile ground for such trickery by supplanting and eventually destroying our country's original sound money system, replacing it with a fiat currency system, and then raising the bar for entry into that system until only their crony-capitalist pals would be able to play their games. Anyone who tries to get around that system, from the Hunt brothers to Khaddafy, gets crushed. What should have been a free-market (and we haven't had one for over 100 years, despite what you may read in Samuelson's Economics, or hear on CNN) has been supplanted by cronyism, protected by regulation. This is the root of fascism.
The real "banking crisis" isn't that a bunch of loans were allowed to be bundled and sold and rebundled and gambled on, but rather that fractional reserves have allowed the player banks to create money out of thin air. You can't repay borrowed money with borrowed money - at least, not in the long term. The game of "kick the can" usually ends when the kids get tired of doing it, or the can gets smashed to the point where it won't roll anymore. We are just about there.
And an awful lot of boards of directors operate as group sociopaths - the corporation is given all the rights of a "person" but can't be sent to jail, the board does whatever makes the most money with little regard to morals, and the board members somehow sleep at night thinking it's the corporations's responsibility not theirs. There are a lot of good companies out there, and honest executives, but there are some pretty despicable ones as well.
I agree.
Corporate personhood could be presented as a logical extension of the socialization of risk allowed by incorporation, but its certainly not an ethical one. Like the above example of crony banking, the personhood wouldn't matter if the laws didn't specifically accommodate it. Laws exist that were specifically created to give corporations the advantage in IP, political contributions, and competition. Those laws were paid for - and sometimes written by - lobbyists employed to give those corporations an advantage. Or as Microsoft used to say, "allow us to innovate".
At the other end of the field, many government agencies, especially those charged with national security in one way or another, have a tendency to see constitutional protections as an irritating roadblock to "getting their jobs done" (too bad - if the rules only apply when convenient, they don't really apply)*. As I said, there needs to be a balance. Both sides need to be kept in check.
I think the problem is far deeper than most people realize. Threats to our country are more likely than not actually threats to the governing system. People thousands of miles away aren't angry at Americans driving to work in sports cars, getting their hair cut, drinking, discussing radical or religious ideas, or going to church or the movies, or what have you. They are angry at the governing parties who continue to screw around with the rest of the world.
If we didn't have a monolithic government bent on controlling our lives and manipulating the entire world, all in the interest of self-preservation and power for the sake of power, would there even be the slightest need for something like the NSA, CIA, or the like?
More importantly - was there
ever the slightest need? I think not.
I'm finding it rather surreal that I trust Microsoft (a company that in it's past life did some pretty dastardly things to screw the competition rather than focusing its efforts on making its own products better) more than I trust the government's security apparatus.
It is weird, considering the burning hatred I felt for them back in the 90s. I still don't trust them, but I trust them a lot more than I'd ever consider trusting the federal apparatus. I have to wonder though what this is really all about. Companies live at the whim of the government, who can make them or their profits disappear just about overnight. Nixon had all the networks cringing in fear because he threatened to take away their broadcast licenses. As a result of direct threats like that, and long term efforts like Operation Mockingbird, these days they are all rollover trick dogs for the bureaucracy. I would think that there is something like that working or in the works at every major tech company.
I think there's a lot of powerful people in the security agencies that think they're helping the country, and that think it's okay to break the rules if "you're the good guys", and don't see that by doing so they're turning into the jackbooted thugs needed to run a police state. But don't take this as, "see, it's the government that's bad, not corporations" - there are serious problems on both sides.
Again, I agree. The problem is still the cronyism. The government builds a structure to allow certain parties to succeed. Then they take the people who are screwed by that and tell them "we can fix this problem if you'll only give us this much more power, and a little more funding". Then they go back to the cronies and give them more favors. It repeats all the time, and the general public keeps falling for it. Ten thousand new pages of laws every year, a court system filled with people trying to break free of what's been done to them, and political hacks arguing over how much they're going to let us keep from what we produce every year.
"Somebody oughta pass a law, I tell you..."
*: (And on a local level in many cities you find that a militarization of the police, post 9/11, has come along with a really strong us-vs-them attitude towards the people they're supposed to be protecting - mix in some bad apple racist cops that their fellow officers choose to form a defensive wall around rather than casting out, and we've seen a lot of unarmed citizen blood spilled and a lot of police coverups, fomenting more distrust and disrespect towards the police.)
So true.
Police have moved from being "peace officers" to "law enforcement officers". A simple traffic stop turns into an inquisition, the most innocuous things somehow become "drug paraphernalia" and the person loses their vehicle (especially if its paid off) because it was allegedly used in the commission of a felony. Simply carrying cash can get you arrested on suspicion of drug activity or, less commonly, providing material support for terrorism. Add to that most of the LEOs hired in that time frame are people coming off multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, who found that their awesome skills developed in military "service" are actually useful for being either a mob enforcer or a cop. Mob work generally doesn't have insurance and pension, and the mob is more likely to cut a troublemaker's throat than they are to keep them working, so that DD214 gets them moved to the head of the line at a police academy. Mix combat trauma with the 1043 gear all the LEOs are getting for free from the DOD, and spice it up with the "officer safety trumps all else" rule, and you have a recipe for disaster.
