...the business community can lobby and subsidize political campaigns and maintain its own propaganda organs, and exploit the racism and nativism of the working class, the capitalist system will remain, and become ever more and more 'unregulated'. Bernie Madoff was punished, but he stole from the rich. Trump is getting away with it because right wing politicians refuse to go after him for his Ukrainian blackmail, contempt of constitutional investigative bodies and incitement of violent election insurrection. Its a small price they will willingly pay for regulatory "reform" and corporate tax cuts.

Sure, we have "laws and regulations" but the entire program of the Conservative movement and the Republican Party is the dismantling of those protections. They used to try and disguise it, now they don't even bother.

The Great Depression was the result of laissez faire economics, but it took a healthy dose of New Deal Socialism and a war against fascism (bitterly opposed by the isolationist Right, you will recall) to finally put to rest the horrors of the Gilded Age. Those Progressive policies, by the way, have been under systematic attack from the Right ever since, and with particularly devastating effectiveness since the Reagan years. Trump is only the final flowering of that decades-long effort. He is not the cause of our present problems, he is the result of our long lasting and lovingly crafted political problem.

My family was deeply scarred by both the Depression and the War. and I was born shortly after they both ended, so I've been watching this unfold throughout my 'nearly eight decade long life'. That gives me some perspective, I think. I simply saw it through a working class upbringing, not from the pollyannish filter of a bourgeois wannabee. If I have prospered during this time it is PRECISELY because I have conducted my education, career and life based on what I saw happening in the housing projects of Ybor City and the racist Right's reaction to the movements and sentiments directed against my generation in the 1960s. Its no coincidence Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, the Environmental Movement and the Vietnam war protests occurred at that time, and were so bitterly opposed by the Right. My college professors were working class blokes who were riflemen in the Big One and got their PHDs through the GI Bill. They taught me well and I listened carefully.

Yeah. Maybe I do have a 'clenched fist life-long belief system' but its because I've seen how the lessons learned in the Depression and the War were systematically perverted throughout my entire life by a political philosophy that capitalized and exploited the consumerist fantasies and racist proclivities of the American working class.

I do agree with you on one thing, though. America's biggest problem is not its economic system, it is its political system. Where you and I differ is that I just don't see any difference between the two. What I see is a temporary alliance between the commercial elite and their wage-slave victims, based on American racism and fundamentalist religious fanaticism. And as soon as the former gets what it really wants, the latter will be abandoned to their own fate.