- in 2008, the United States suffered the worst financial crash since 1929. It was followed by the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Big banks, which had bent the law to reap millions, were widely seen to have precipitated the calamity. And the super-rich, in turn, have been the big winners in the recovery: Labor participation has been at record lows and workers’ wages are lagging, yet the income of the top one percent has continued to skyrocket: According to University of California economist Emanuel Saez, it shot up 31.4 percent from 2009 to 2012.
Is this really all that puzzling? The beginnings of public dissent in the form of the Occupy movement was swiftly and violently squashed. Protesters were beaten, maced, threatened, shot, and tazed. The police brutality is well documented, as is the infiltration of the group by government officials. This was coupled with a propaganda campaign to paint the protesters as listless, entitled, and stupid. The public received the message loud and clear - there is nothing you can do. If you try to speak up, you will be discredited, assaulted, and locked away. These tactics are not at all new; there is a long history of civil rights groups and protesters being subverted and intimidated in this country.
I feel like we are trying to find an enemy. We are trying to find a scapegoat that we can point to when things go bad (2008 crash), but in reality it's just the result of an error in a flawed system. Instead of fixing that system's flaws, we are instead focusing on the proverbial boogeyman for whom which we can blame all our shortcoming and failures. The same way early man tried to explain/blame things he could not understand or comprehend on supernatural forces greater than himself, we are trying to blame the shortcoming of a global interconnected economy and society too complex for us as individuals to understand on an external entity. The liberals and Occupy movement have settled on the rich. The conservatives and Tea Party have settled on Obama and federal government. Instead of looking for these "boogeyman" for whom we seek to blame, we should start looking for the root causes of our strife. Look for what caused the 2008 crash instead of who. What caused the income disparity instead of who.
I know people hate this answer, but it's because the so called "plutocracy" isn't a big evil entity trying to screw us over, and nobody who understands the situation has the drive to punish or "oust" this so called plutocracy. Our issues are ourselves. The US gets the government the US deserves. When we vote in new people, it will be because we actually do think the old ones failed us.