America appears to be rapidly approaching outright corporate feudalism:
The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.
Keep in mind the amount of data the average American citizen has to turn over just to buy a $50 cell phone or open a bank account. You can’t even withdraw $5,000 of your own money from your savings account without a report being filled out and sent to the FBI, but the Federal Reserve is permitted to not report where $2,000,000,000 is going.