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Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

Governments are to blame for completely incompetent and corrupt policies. They are the ones who did not push for alternative energy sources while they had the chance, they are the ones who did not invest in homebuilding, they are the ones who did not take pandemic preparation seriously, they are the ones that allowed corporations to take all their manufacturing to China, they are the ones who did not raise the minimum wage and allowed C-Level pay to run rampant, they are the ones who allowed banks to be bailed out with tax payer money with no real consequences for those who caused the problems, they are the ones who did not assemble a proper response when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 or take the Russian threat seriously, they are the ones who set the rules and they are the ones who have been exploiting their countries for decades for their own gain.

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Corporation are really the ones responsible for what you mention as they lobbied for all of these not to happen for profit’s sake.

And they won at that game.

Yes corporations lobbied for them, as it is in their interest to do so. The government is meant to represent the interests of the people. It has and had the option to:

a) rewrite the laws governing corporations so that they have purposes other than maximising shareholder profits

b) ignore the lobbying, not take the bribes and act in the long term interest of their constituents

It's easier to take money and 'advice' from a few lobbyists, most of whom you know, than a mass of people with conflicting opinions whom you've never met. Especially when those lobbyists are buying you dinner and paying for trips all the time.

Then there's the indoctrination about how big companies represent the people too, create jobs, and deserve to have their own voice, their own tax breaks, etc.

Let's not pretend that our supposedly angelic civil servants & institutions don't happily take money in one form or the other.

Here in America, we've had the option to vote for more sustainable and green options since Jimmy Carter, but "oh no my economy" is cited as the reason why it has been categorically rejected time after time. How can you blame the government for doing what people asked of it? People voted to not do the right things, for a multitude of reasons, often including "someone (or some news show) told me it would hurt me"

So then government should make tougher laws surrounding the media. Break up empires such as Murdoch’s. Make it mandatory for media organisations to be co-operatives or some other such structure that disallows ownership by billionaires or corporations who can use them to push their own agenda. I’m not saying these are the solutions, but there are solutions out there to the problems that aren’t just the status quo. We just have to find them and be brave enough to try them. And yes I agree with you that citizens must also take responsibility for continually electing corrupt leaders.

People vote for energy that doesn't impoverish them. That's fine in my book. Jimmy Carter was a disaster and the idea that solar just needed more investment was and still is a sick joke.

At the end of the day, "being green" is tantamount to depriving people of cheap, reliable energy and thus destroying living standards. I don't blame them for choosing against impoverishment.

> Governments are to blame for...not push for alternative energy sources while they had the chance

Here in the US roughly 1/2 the population believes climate change is a hoax or exaggerated by researchers to get gov't grant money. It's hard to run a democracy properly when half the country are conspiratorial about major issues.

> Here in the US roughly 1/2 the population believes climate change is a hoax or exaggerated by researchers to get gov't grant money.

They didn't get that idea based on their own careful research. They were told that climate change was a hoax by powerful industries who wanted to take advantage of ignorance for profit. Those same industries were paying off politicians for the same reason.

The problem isn't the people who were lied to, it still falls on the government since they've dropped the ball on public education and allowed those industries to have too much power and influence.

Society is to blame for not holding the government accountable. Society is to blame for not holding corporations accountable.

Society is allowing these governments and corporations to pillage our worth as people, as individuals, as contributors to the planet.

The never-ending pacification of society through extremely obvious marketing and propaganda, fed through social media, filter bubbles, and ostracization of peers based on their personal opinions and beliefs.

Marketing to convince us that yes - you do want your manufacturing jobs outsourced to third-world countries because that means cheaper widgets for you! Don't worry about the high chance that slave labor is being used to put together your iPhones, your shoes, etc. while these companies slowly increase their prices because now your phone can talk to satellites and totally not because they want to increase profit margins! Don't think about how your electric car batteries had their lithium mined by children who slave away in tailing ponds while the western world likes to pretend they're better than everyone else.

Propaganda in media (print, social media, TV) to convince us that the government wants only the best for you, that the economy is failing "and here's why that's a good thing!", that our society needs to import more and more immigrants who are more than happy to come over due to the huge disparity of living standards compared to their own country - who are happy to work for minimum wage and keep their mouth shut or they get sent back to their country before their citizenship gets approved - who are happy to live in basements hastily converted to rental space in exchange for most of their paycheck - instead of actually encouraging higher birth rates for native-born citizens and/or for people who are already here.

Propaganda that tries to convince you through mind games that the economy irresponsibly running hot for DECADES while relying on foreign supply chains for critical supplies wasn't and isn't a bad idea, even after Covid hit the globe. The same propaganda from media outlets that try to convince you that no, your political representatives aren't insider trading, aren't cooperating with foreign agents/spies and _definitely_ have your best interests at heart.

Social media is a wonderful tool, but has been aggressively co-opted by both corporate and governmental interests to control how we communicate, to influence what we think and say - much much more easier compared to television where you couldn't provide input for the system to fine-tune what these companies really want you to think.

Social media actively removing any sort of discourse that doesn't fit "the narrative" - today's misinformation is tomorrows fact, and todays fact is tomorrows misinformation - depending on who's paying and who's interests are being looked after.

The constant division created in the media of left vs right, white vs black, natural-born vs immigrant, low-income vs high-income.

What can we do? Well, I'd pose a few potential solutions but I don't want to be misconstrued as advocating for violence. Violence is the government's job since they have the monopoly on it.

> What can we do? Well, I'd pose a few potential solutions but I don't want to be misconstrued as advocating for violence. Violence is the government's job since they have the monopoly on it.

The government's monopoly on violence is only a problem because they've spent centuries carefully working to minimize the ability for the people to enact meaningful change via any other means. As long as it's still theoretically possible to change things then society can continue to get the blame for things being what they are no matter how impossible change is practically, but it doesn't really seem fair to blame society for not fixing everything after they've been poisoned, blindfolded, had their hands tied behind their backs.

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