WYSK: There funded by dark money PACS, but some good reporting has brought out these names: David Koch, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Harlan Crow, and Michael Bloomberg. Some of there members are most famous for stopping big bills. Joe Leiberman, for example, single handedly stopped the single payer portion of the ACA. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsen Simena kept the John Lewis voting rights act from passing, and famously kept the senate from repealing the filibuster.
Sadly it is just as easy to just squash the protest and be done with it. France has major problems with riots since a while. Mostly because of racism, police violence and inescapable poverty.
So who does Macron blame for the riots? TikTok and parents who didn’t teach their children how to behave correctly.
What does he do? Kart in more police with heavier anti-riot gear.
Same with Russia, Turkey or Poland. People don’t like the government? No problem, just grad random people from the protests and send them to a gulag. The rest of the protesters will get scared and fall in line. Done.
Sure, at some point a tipping point might come. Then you get a revolution or a civil war, and then the dice are in the air. Could be you get a new, super democratic government that tries to fix the system. Or you could get a military dictatorship. You never know.
Sorry, I am pretty disilusioned by all this. Representative democracy just makes it too easy for populism to blind the electorate (“Don’t look at me, while I shovel lots of government money into my pockets, look at the evil immigrant over there!”), and there is far too much temptation for corrupt politicians to extend their power.
And there are no real checks and balances in any system I have seen so far.
E.g. the USA: Yeah, the house, the senate, the president, the surpreme court and all, they should separate the power and they should check and balance eachother. Problem is, the writers of the constitution totally forgot that parties could be a thing. And the checks and balances just plainly don’t work if all these offices are dominated by the same party.
Yeah, my last response was way too half-baked, I didn’t really put as much thought into it as I thought I had, and I didn’t like how close I was getting to sounding like I wanted violence (even though I don’t). So I deleted it, to avoid spreading these worrisome comments (to myself, anyway) any more than I already did. I’m not sure exactly how effective “deleting” really is on a federated network like this, which I’m very new to, and I also don’t want to annoy people by deleting comments after they reply to them. So I’m sorry for being annoying, if I have been, and hopefully I’ll have some better takes once I get more used to being on Lemmy.