Our Idiot Brother: The Tea Party’s Relationship to Occupy Wall Street
Being able to describe patterns of interaction (in your case, between corporations and government agencies) is a primitive level of analysis. Sticking to this simplistic format leaves no options but revolution, thereby throwing out everything accompanied with much pain and suffering.
Better to devise changes that can reinstate competing forces to zero out their effects. That is how the brain works. Neurons fire in such a random fashion that small changes in stimulation input lead to changes in behavior. When too many neurons go off together, it results in pain, spasm, seizure or tics. The best system is sensitive to inputs from all sources. We had such a system of “checks and balances” until bills became too difficult for our elected representatives to understand, until the judges decided that precedent was useless in determining current decision and until the executive branch decided that large changes were more important than small changes. What we have here is the Peter Principle applied to an entire system. Pelosi’s comment to the House of Representatives about Obamacare is most emblematic of the stage we have reached in our ability to govern ourselves, i.e., “We’ll have to pass [Obamacare] to find out what’s in it.”
