I actually do disagree with the trope that corporations are above government on the totem poll. IMO it's baby's first questioning things and it persists past the point that people should see stronger forces.
I don't know if he gets into it later in his book. The fact that he titled it Quantum of Conscienceless leads me to think he may think about somethings the same way I do. But intelligence is systems interacting with and impacting each other. It's never unidirectional. And together they make a kind of whole while also being apart. It depends on the moment which is more productive to think about. But one system can impact another stronger. Government sure impacts us more than we impact it. Just like in thermodynmaics, the boundaries we draw of what is inside and outside a system and what is inside and outside of another system and how they interact is arbitrary and subject to the analysis one wants to do.
When given all of government and all of corporations as the boundries I would still say government impacts corporations more than the other way around. The government tells Facebook or Google to censor, they do it. Government through NGOs demands all corporations in lockstep adopt anti-whitism, they all do it in lock step with no varience. Thank you Obama. Maybe if you compare all of corporations vs only the legislative side of government it is true. But IMO that is focusing on the political and elected side of government which is hardly what the majority of government is.
But there is another boundry we can draw that I think makes a lot of sense to view as a single unit. The (Fed + Government + big 5 "private" banks) union. The Fed is the most powerful in this union. The government needs the Fed to lend to the banks (the Fed's proxy) to lend to the government for the government to continue it's annual operations. By matter of leverage the government operates at the license of the Fed. So if the government is going to continue to operate it must do one thing... serve the interest of its master. So then the government is an extension of the Fed and not the other way around, more primarily. The entire function of the government is to preserve money printing as a scheme. Everything else is secondary. It does this via a few things. One is taxation that requires you pay a fee for existing using a token the Fed can print. This provides a layer of concrete utility for the token to be valued a layer below its secondarily gained utility as a unit of trade and speculation. The next way is via military force against anything that threatens that model. And the next is via financial regulation also intended to squash any competing model.
And this is why I say the corporations are not higher on the totem poll to the government. Because the Fed + Government entity is entirely more powerful than them. Corporations know it. They spend their entire existence chasing what the Fed can print hoping they do it well enough that they can survive. While the Fed hardly has to think about survival. It has an entire military at it's disposal. The whole financial sector knows to not piss it off, and the financial sector can squash any corporation it wants at any time if it were ever a threat.
People see Monsanto lobby congress for a law and they think Monsanto owns the government. They have influence in Congress, and Congress doesn't own the government. Meanwhile why is Monsanto doing it? To chase profit in a game that is entirely the (Fed+Govt)'s game it built and controls.
The more risk an entity faces for its survival the less control it really has and the more it is a product of the Machiavellian forces placed on it. Corporations come and go and have to fight for survival. The government and Fed not so much. So corporations are the most accepting power center to be influenced in this ecosystem of power centers. If Monsanto can get a law adjusted for its favor it's because, for the government, being influenced that way doesn't really interfere with it's core mission. It doesn't mean Monsanto owns it. It just means they have more influence that you or I have, which is a given because we have close to zero. Just because there is a fish bigger than you does not mean it is the biggest fish. People can't even see the bigger fish including the one we are all currently inside the belly of. In that sense Monsanto and Pfizer and Unilever are all very very tiny fish.
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I actually do disagree with the trope that corporations are above government on the totem poll. IMO it's baby's first questioning things and it persists past the point that people should see stronger forces.
I don't know if he gets into it later in his book. The fact that he titled it Quantum of Conscienceless leads me to think he may think about somethings the same way I do. But intelligence is systems interacting with and impacting each other. It's never unidirectional. And together they make a kind of whole while also being apart. It depends on the moment which is more productive to think about. But one system can impact another stronger. Government sure impacts us more than we impact it. Just like in thermodynmaics, the boundaries we draw of what is inside and outside a system and what is inside and outside of another system and how they interact is arbitrary and subject to the analysis one wants to do.
When given all of government and all of corporations as the boundries I would still say government impacts corporations more than the other way around. The government tells Facebook or Google to censor, they do it. Government through NGOs demands all corporations in lockstep adopt anti-whitism, they all do it in lock step with no varience. Thank you Obama. Maybe if you compare all of corporations vs only the legislative side of government it is true. But IMO that is focusing on the political and elected side of government which is hardly what the majority of government is.
But there is another boundry we can draw that I think makes a lot of sense to view as a single unit. The (Fed + Government + big 5 "private" banks) union. The Fed is the most powerful in this union. The government needs the Fed to lend to the banks (the Fed's proxy) to lend to the government for the government to continue it's annual operations. By matter of leverage the government operates at the license of the Fed. So if the government is going to continue to operate it must do one thing... serve the interest of its master. So then the government is an extension of the Fed and not the other way around, more primarily. The entire function of the government is to preserve money printing as a scheme. Everything else is secondary. It does this via a few things. One is taxation that requires you pay a fee for existing using a token the Fed can print. This provides a layer of concrete utility for the token to be valued a layer below its secondarily gained utility as a unit of trade and speculation. The next way is via military force against anything that threatens that model. And the next is via financial regulation also intended to squash any competing model.
And this is why I say the corporations are not higher on the totem poll to the government. Because the Fed + Government entity is entirely more powerful than them. Corporations know it. They spend their entire existence chasing what the Fed can print hoping they do it well enough that they can survive. While the Fed hardly has to think about survival. It has an entire military at it's disposal. The whole financial sector knows to not piss it off, and the financial sector can squash any corporation it wants at any time if it were ever a threat.
People see Monsanto lobby congress for a law and they think Monsanto owns the government. They have influence in Congress, and Congress doesn't own the government. Meanwhile why is Monsanto doing it? To chase profit in a game that is entirely the (Fed+Govt)'s game it built and controls.
The more risk an entity faces for its survival the less control it really has and the more it is a product of the Machiavellian forces placed on it. Corporations come and go and have to fight for survival. The government and Fed not so much. So corporations are the most accepting power center to be influenced in this ecosystem of power centers. If Monsanto can get a law adjusted for its favor it's because, for the government, being influenced that way doesn't really interfere with it's core mission. It doesn't mean Monsanto owns it. It just means they have more influence that you or I have, which is a given because we have close to zero. Just because there is a fish bigger than you does not mean it is the biggest fish. People can't even see the bigger fish including the one we are all currently inside the belly of. In that sense Monsanto and Pfizer and Unilever are all very very tiny fish.