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Comment by Veelox | Hacker News Reader

I forget, is it Big Banks, Big Tech, Big Pharm, Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Telecom, For-Profit Prisons, or the Military Industrial Complex that is most in charge of legislators? I can never seem to remember which one is really running the country.

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Very rich people and (to the extent that they are lumbering hive minds driven by their own rules to persue profit at any cost) corporations have undue influence at most levels of US government. Thats pretty obvious to most of us watching from afar. If you wanted a pithy term to sum this up you could go for 'big money'. The US has ostensibly good democratic structures and systems but they have to a very large extent been 'captured' by the rich and powerful, as the parlance goes.

I wonder if we could come up with some set of characteristics common to those groups, perhaps a useful umbrella term. Oh well, guess we can't!

In all seriousness, who is it that you think is running the country?

Rich, powerful, corporations?

Is that who were suggesting?

The operative part in "Big ___ owns the system" is the Big, not the ___. The political system is an arena in which entrenched and monied interests set the agenda and dictate the terms of debate. Issues concerning society at large are crowded out.

Each one of them owns the part of the gov't that oversees their part.

Big money runs the country, everything else is just noise.

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