Technology

You obviously have a flawed system but you still have a choice compared to those countries.

As a bourgeois democracy we’ve never really much choice electorally.

Princeton University Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Before that there was a black man.

Michael Hudson on the 2008 Great Recession:

All of these loans were against fictitious mortgages, mortgages that pretended that there was value there, but there were mortgages mainly to Black and Hispanic borrowers by banks who cheated them, who over-evaluated the prices. The banks in general discovered a new way of making money after about 2004. They could make money by charging racial minorities much higher rates, almost double the rates that they charged white people. There were whole banks and brokers that specialized in this, and this was basically the junk mortgage group. Countrywide, Financial was the most obvious beneficiary of this.

There were a number of notorious banks that ended up being merged. Bank of America was one of the crooked banks. Citibank was one of the most crooked banks, as has been very well documented. Randal Wray at the Levy Institute and Kansas City published a big explanation of who were these $29 trillion, $27 trillion of loans for. It ended up many of these loans were rolled over and reloaned, so the net amount was not $27 trillion, but that’s how much was given to the banks with this huge jump. Instead of sending the bankers to jail, they made them billionaires. They rewarded them. That was the Obama policy, and that is what makes them one of the most viciously racist presidents in modern American history.