[Finnucane]

Like anything else, it's a political issue. Meaning: citizens have to give a shit about it, be informed, and be vocal about it with their representatives. Republicans in Congress just voted to roll back Dodd-Frank, and are aiming to get rid of the CFPB. Why? Because the CFPB is actually trying to protect people from shit like this.

[zo1]

Everyone is kicking the blame elsewhere. First, the banks, then lack of regulations, then too-much regulations, then imperfect regulations, then corruptible regulators, then finally the people that don't participate in politics.

The more I follow politics, and the media in general, I am leaning towards describing the entire thing as a giant soap opera where the media only "comments" or "gossips" instead of reporting facts and assigning provable blame. Everyone just passes off blame, no one really can hold anyone else accountable, and the cycle just repeats constantly. This is a fault of the system in that it allows blame to be passed along like that. The problem never really being addressed, just half-assed by each batch of politicians so that they can simultaneously take some blame, take some credit for trying, and also not be held accountable in any way.

[rhizome]

One thing I've learned as I've grown older is that the penalties for these things are absolutely malleable and the law can say "no, there's no passing the buck, the bank is responsible." Or the consumer. Whatever the politics of the day say should happen.

[convolvatron]

ok, so we've abandoned the notion of objective truth and everything is all about the narrative.

the interesting question is whether or not there ever really was a cycle where the citizenry were informed, and could collectively influence policy.

even if we were just being naive, the abandonment of that model doesn't seem to have empowered the populace - seemingly the opposite.

[zo1]

>"ok, so we've abandoned the notion of objective truth and everything is all about the narrative."

Essentially, yes. Everything is relative, and since we have no base-principles to infer complex laws/rules/behavior from, we're constantly bickering with one another about minute details.

>"the interesting question is whether or not there ever really was a cycle where the citizenry were informed, and could collectively influence policy."

That's an interesting question. I can't say I can think of such a time. But I guess as a seemingly-intelligent and connected society with all of humanity's knowledge available at our fingertips, we should be striving for such a thing. Not defending an already-broken system just because we've decided it's "good enough".

It's nigh-impossible to actually do any sort of "corrective" maintenance on the system we have in place. Just look at Trump, or Brexit. The much-touted "checks and balances" is actively hindering his policies from being enacted (the one that got him voted in). Additionally, with Brexit, it's exposing just how complicated and intertwined global "contracts" and laws are between nations. In both cases we have giant behemoths of laws and processes in place to simply stunt any sort of correction or movement in any direction (whether good or bad). At that glacial pace, I don't think our life-spans are enough to see things through, or see drastic change or experiments when it comes to the models of government we've already-defined and have available.

[PatentTroll]

The checks and balances you deride are not abstract concepts, words do not leap from paper and take action. The checks and balances you disparage are people who disagree, which actually is how it's supposed to work.