The executive has a reach into the metadata of everyone in every branch of government as well as every activist in every party, everyone with a political opinion or a complaint.
Wall Street colluded to fix interest rates and just about everything else and no one has been prosecuted.
Lenders committed fraud in order to foreclose on homeowners who had been goaded into mortgages that cost more than the houses that were their security, but no lenders were prosecuted, not to speak of anyway.
We have seen fraud upon fraud, no indictments.

And meanwhile, our government is spying on all our metadata, knows who we call, when, who we e-mail, when and all our financial relationships, all our family and friends and just how often we are in contact with them.

But it's all cool because only a few people have been arrested or beaten by the police. Only a few have lost their jobs. Only a small percentage of homeowners lost their homes. Only a small proportion of Americans declared bankruptcy. So it's all cool with the government snooping on our private business.

"We think we are free."

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

. . . .
. . . "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

. . . .