[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.