You're pointing the finger in slightly the wrong direction. It's not the fault of the political system as such, this is because we have allowed our society to be captured by the psychopaths who rule Corporate America.
It's never "the policies we voted for". It's always "the other guy is fucking me over". You people are so fucking pathetic.
In their unending greed and eternal search for quick easy money and ever more power they have de-industrialized the country,
What a crock of shit. The richest companies in this country are companies that you VOLUNTARILY throw money at, hand over fist. Not a single one of them is extracting money from you, without your active consent. Microsoft never forced you to buy their OS. They did some shady shit, I'm not gonna absolve them.. But it was never not possible to bypass those cunts entirely. Apple was always an alternative.. Yeah, there was a lot of software you missed out on if you went the non-MS route.. And? It was a CHOICE to use them.
gutted research and development into new technologies,
Are you actually retarded? Name a country that spends more on R&D than the US. Both as a whole, and separated into Private / Government spending. Name one. You might not like the technologies that are being invested in, but your statement is MORONIC. Something like $2T is being dumped into AI. That's R&D.. That's the development of a new technology.. Who has the most advanced military hardware? China? The Pentagon might blow through money like no other entity on the planet, but they do produce results...
And how much did Elon spend on getting SpaceX to the hyper-reliable launch platform it is today? Do you have any idea how NASA's failure record stacks up against SpaceX? Elon averages a 1.1% cost overrun on contracts. NASA? NINETY-FUCKING-PERCENT. That's the goddamn AVERAGE. A SpaceX project generally bears fruit in about 4 years. NASA takes seven.. His launch failure rate is 1/3 of NASA's (admittedly, NASA does have a solid and respectable reputation for getting cargo to orbit.. But Elon's is still better..He's cheaper. He's more reliable.. He doesn't tolerate overspending (but it's clear he's not cutting corners), and he's already matched NASAs "peak" of 42 launches in a single year. Name a country or organization that can get shit to space better than him. The Russians? No. They're also damn good. But his failure rate is 1/6.
stunted the migration to renewable energy and sustainable agriculture, and on and on.
What a crock of shit.. They fiercest opposition I see comes from you lunatic fucking leftists. I'm seeing it in real time in my area.. Company buys a bunch of scrub land out in the back country to put in a solar farm.. The tree-huggers come out of the woodwork to oppose it.. Proposals being floated to do the same in the DESERT just an hour to my east.. Again.. Nothing but environmental opposition.. It's always that fucking Tortoise.. You nut-jobs scream about renewables and then oppose EVERY. SINGLE. DEPLOYMENT of it. They want to get about $20B (estimated) in Lithium out of the ground near the Salton Sea (and area already polluted beyond the pale).. You think the lefties are okay with this?
So yeah, our political system is broken, but it wasn't voters who broke it.
Exactly. It's never been about the people you voted to do this, or do that.. No, they were all corrupt and paid for. Except the one you voted for, right? California has had a lefty veto-proof super-majority for four decades. 40 years of Republican governors having effectively zero power.. At most, they could block legislation that had even lefties divided.. And yet here we are... the highest cost-of-living in the country. The most homeless people. Aging and decrepit infrastructure.. Low PPP (Purchasing power parity). Example: A person earning minimum wage in Texas ($7.25/hour) is (slightly) financially better off than a person in CA making the state's minimum wage ($20/hour). We have the highest gas prices, highest state taxes, highest DMV renewal fees, highest electrical prices.. And a MASSIVE poverty problem... And you guys always point to a Republican president or corporations and blame them.. In fact, name a single "conservative" state that has a population-proportional (per capita) debt load as high as California's. Oh, the lefties love to claim this is the "6th largest economy in the world" but never seem to mention the MASSIVE Sovereign Debt this state and constituent counties and cities have accumulated. Our lefty politicians are STILL trying to justify a project cost (initial estimate and voter-initiative was $12 billion) for our "high-speed rail system" that has ballooned to $124 Billion. That's $124 billion NOT going to any project meant to help anybody in this state. That's an amount equal to 10% of the state's yearly budget. And not a single goddamn human has been moved from Point A to Point B yet... The Swiss bored a hole through 14 km of solid granite and built a railway for $7 billion... We're at nearly $124 billion and can't seem to finish track that is primarily traversing flat desert...
Most of us were just hypnotized by the show put on by the corporate media and didn't realize what was happening.
It's always someone else's fault..