[AndrewBissell]

> 40 percent concurred with the thought that "When it comes to our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking 'just let them all burn' "; and 40 percent also agreed that "we cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over."

Hard not to sympathize with this perspective when:

- The people running the country lie us into an unending, ruinous war with help from the establishment media, and no one is held to account.

- The people running the country demolish the economy with unsustainable debt-driven speculation, and no one is held to account.

- The people running the country openly associate with a convicted trafficker of children, who conveniently dies in prison before naming any names and while the cameras were "inoperable" and the guards asleep and his cellmate transferred out at just the right moment, and (just wait for it!) no one is held to account.

"Let them all burn" may not be the right answer, but at the very highest levels our political and social institutions are rotten to the core.

[mirimir]

From Judas Priest:

    You can look to the left and look to the right
    But you will live in danger tonight
    When the enemy comes he will never be heard
    He'll blow your mind and not say a word.
    Blinding lights--flashing colors
    Sleepless nights...
    If the man with the power
    Can't keep it under control
    Some heads are gonna roll
    ...
    The power-mad freaks who are ruling the earth
    Will show how little they think you're worth
    With animal lust they'll devour your life
    And slice your word to bits like a knife
    One last day burning hell fire
    You're blown away... 
    If the man with the power
    Can't keep it under control
    Some heads are gonna roll
    ...

[lopmotr]

Yet almost everyone keeps on voting for the same people to run the country. They mostly believe keeping the enemy other party out of power is more important than all of the other problems combined. Either that or they don't vote which is itself a vote for the establishment.

[armitron]

There is no alternative, other than not voting. The political parties in the USA are not the issue, since they are both playing for the same team (big banks and corporations). It is unfathomable to many that Obama (either through naivety or deliberate will) let Wall St off the hook. That was a moment that defined the decade.

The system is corrupt because the checks and balances that used to be there were dismantled (or slowly erroded in some cases).

The non-stop materialism-consumerism and lust for money that defined USA after WW2 (especially in the 80s-90s) can be seen as a way to control-appease (or distract) the population at large so that the power players could continue their orgy uninterrupted. But even consumerism and cheap entertainment is now coming apart. You can see it everywhere around you. The masses are reaching a boiling point and fireworks are to be expected.

[repolfx]

No, that's just a standard Marxist lens on things. Nobody in Wall St was let off the hook because incompetence is not illegal, nor should it be. The masses aren't about to engage in counter capitalist revolution any more than they were 100 years ago. Big banks and corporations aren't a "team" that people play for, they're just ways in which resource allocation is organised. There is no control-appeasement, whatever that's meant to be. Just people trying to rule systems far too large and complicated for them, mostly at the behest of voters, and failing at it.

[AndrewBissell]

Even for the ones who didn't do anything illegal, they were certainly "let off the hook" in the sense that the massive bonuses they were paid for economically destructive decisions were never clawed back, and in fact the same fundamental structures of "no skin in the game" and "privatized gains, socialized losses" were preserved and even strengthened in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In the most egregious instance of this, firms which would have been nothing but smoking holes in the ground without public capital injections and backstops were allowed to pay out colossal bonuses to the same people who got them into that mess in the first place.

However, it's also certainly not the case that there were no criminal acts of fraud committed by Wall St execs during the 2000s bubble. Dick Fuld's Repo 105 scam is a great example: https://www.epsilontheory.com/repo-105/

[repolfx]

You're completely right about the problem of socialized losses, but that's a system level problem rather than a problem of individuals - it would exist even if everyone in the financial industry was completely replaced. And it's ultimately a problem created by governments, which implicitly promise to bail out bankrupt institutions if they're "too big to fail" (where how big that is, isn't defined anywhere).

I haven't heard about Dick Fuld, I'll read your link, thanks.

[AndrewBissell]

I think Trump is a particularly skilled con artist, who manages to sell himself as the tableflipper candidate even though he is as much a creature of the establishment as all the rest of them. So I don't think it's true that people are voting for continuity even though (so far) that's been the practical result.

As another counterpoint, Bernie Sanders consistently attracts a large share of the vote while explicitly advocating for socialism. It's very possible he would have been the Democratic candidate for POTUS in 2016 if the DNC had not kneecapped his campaign.

[mistermann]

And like Bernie, another relatively non-establishment candidate that could have given people something actually new to vote for seems to have now been taken care of, once again with some fancy footwork (cherry picking of polls this time) by the DNC.

It's pretty hard to not vote for the same people when anyone that doesn't fit the proper mold isn't handicapped through the nomination process.

I'd post some supporting links, but for every article I could post supporting my thesis someone could easily post one that denies it. Articles and discussions on such topics are rarely substantially based on facts, the whole thing is largely propaganda.

The best commentary I've heard on the subject of nomination shenanigans in both parties has been from Dan Carlin (of Hardcore History fame) on his lesser known podcast "Common Sense with Dan Carlin". He knows a thing or two about history and politics, and he is fairly disgusted with the entire political system in the US.

[mikelyons]

And assassination used to be the way this was corrected?

[ineedasername]

I didn't see anything in the parent comment about assassination, but given the topic: Yes, when governments were effectively embodied by one single person invested with something approaching absolute power, bumping off that person would change the situation. Of course it often plunged the kingdom into some type of crisis until the succession was decided and a new monarch/king/whatever was installed. That's still the case in some countries, like what happened in Iraq w/ Saddam Hussein (yes, it was more complicated than that, I know) But in other countries that have some flavor of democracy, bumping off the person in charge is not really a path to changing the social/economic order. The power structures go way beyond a single individual, and continuity is fairly well preserved.

[mikelyons]

So then civil war is the way it can be corrected?