249: Politics
Politics.
What can I say? You think you've got it bad with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Or Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? Imagine this country nine decades from now, when you don't even have those pretensions of state authority anymore.
Yeah, you think you've got it bad? 2099 is worse. There is no government; there are just giant corporations that not only hold the purse strings, they also control the military, the police are their wholly owned subsidiaries, everything that used to be the job of the government in this time is now a for-profit subsidiary of some megacorp. Try to think about that. Try to think about it for a good long minute.
And before you start talking about how that's already happened, no, it hasn't. What you're likely to describe is the state working jointly with the private sector for the mutual benefit of both; private sector gets profit, state gets power. 2099 is basically the state completely subsumed into the corporate, with the megacorps being the government by default.
Believe it or not, you have it fairly good now.