[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.