901
Fundamentally the problem is that the US is just too rich. That creates incentives, like:
- A strong incentive to use media to control the abundance of resources for personal benefit
- Valuable advertising, leading to corporate propaganda that exploits our emotions, and hyperemotional, fluffy news coverage designed to grab our attention rather than inform
- A near-monopoly on extremely wealthy people, which leads those people to spend directly on promoting pro-stratification candidates
This creates a catch-22. To fix the media and government, we need to spread out wealth to dilute financial power. But to do that would require policy changes that require fixing the media and government.