Exactly, the relationship between the RIAA and the Feds is symbiotic. In this regard, it mirrors many other relationships where"support" for private interests offers people in government with a way to exceed their properly limited power. The folks on the other side of this trade benefit from a business that is probably less challenging to manage that it would be without participation in this corruption.
Total dependence on private election finance, rampant gerrymandering (which further compromises the vote through the engineering of 'safe' seats), and the unfettered ability to spend one's career oscillating between public and private offices form the structural underpinnings of American-style corruption.
The good news (if you can call it that) is that problems with precise structural causes can be remedied with surgical precision, but only if you can get the patient on the operating table. So far, the things that have permitted the cancer to grow are a lack of awareness about its exact location and effect, and a lack of concern given its apparent lack of malignancy. The last three years have ended the latter problem, and as more people take an interest in exactly what's gone wrong with America, more attention will fall on the former.
The other bit of good news is that these fundamentally corrupt arrangements depend on security through obscurity. Thanks to an utterly pliant national press, this obscurity has thrived for decades. But this, too, is changing. Not because the press has suddenly decided to start doing its job, but because others now have the means to do it for them. Unlike the established players, they also have the will.
Total dependence on private election finance, rampant gerrymandering (which further compromises the vote through the engineering of 'safe' seats), and the unfettered ability to spend one's career oscillating between public and private offices form the structural underpinnings of American-style corruption.
The good news (if you can call it that) is that problems with precise structural causes can be remedied with surgical precision, but only if you can get the patient on the operating table. So far, the things that have permitted the cancer to grow are a lack of awareness about its exact location and effect, and a lack of concern given its apparent lack of malignancy. The last three years have ended the latter problem, and as more people take an interest in exactly what's gone wrong with America, more attention will fall on the former.
The other bit of good news is that these fundamentally corrupt arrangements depend on security through obscurity. Thanks to an utterly pliant national press, this obscurity has thrived for decades. But this, too, is changing. Not because the press has suddenly decided to start doing its job, but because others now have the means to do it for them. Unlike the established players, they also have the will.