We Can Do A Lot Better Than This

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.
Politics is absolutely hopeless. That’s why everything has gone wrong. You have ninety-nine percent of the people thinking “politics,” and hollering and yelling. And that won’t get you anywhere. Hollering and yelling won’t get you across the English Channel. It won’t reach from continent to continent; you need electronics for that, and you have to know what you’re doing. Evolution has been at work doing all these things so it is now possible. Nobody has consciously been doing it. The universe is a lot bigger than you and me. We didn’t invent it. If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine.
- Quotes by Buckminster Fuller
When thinking about the financial crisis of nearly a decade ago, many people wrongly focus on the event itself as opposed to the response. I'm of the view that the most destructive aspect of that grotesque period of American history wasn't the collapse itself, but the government and central bank response to it. This response centered around bailing out and rewarding those most responsible for the disaster, which merely served to further concentrate power and wealth in the hands of people who should be rotting in jail as opposed to guzzling Château Lafite at Davos.
Once the U.S. permitted the crime of the century to go, not just unpunished, but handsomely rewarded, we solidified an incentive structure in which elite criminality became the only game in town. If you're a sociopathic person driven by greed and unbounded by any semblance of decency, the response to the crisis proved you'll never face consequences for your crimes as long as you're a top tier predator. As such, there's absolutely nothing holding back the worst of the worst, and things are turning out exactly as you'd expect within such an environment.
There's nothing more destructive to a society than the institutionalization of immunity for elite criminals, yet that's exactly what's happened since the financial crisis. Top tier predators, whether they operate within government or mega corporations, recognize that the system they control will never hold them accountable for anything they do. In the past week alone, we've seen two additional examples of what occurs within a culture of rampant elite lawlessness.
First, we learned that the FBI conveniently "lost" text messages between two key government officials. Politico reports:
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