Guy has it in a nut shell.......

We don't have evil geniuses running the show.
 
We have greedy Fascist manipulating our money. In order to get richer they buy enough of the media and our politicians to accumulate power and luxuries.

Running our lives is not much on their agenda, however. Taking care of their own is. If destroying everything we believe in is what it take, then that's what will happen.

But what can we do?

it seems most  politicians we have has to play ball or be out of office. There is always someone in love with power to take their place. Rhetoric means squat. Party? Yea right. Elections? Make me laugh.

At times it appears that they are all powerful but they can't keep up with the ever  ending cycle of greed begetting greed creating more greed. Eventually there is nothing else left.

Waste and fraud permeates their every corner as you can't rob everybody to pay everybody because over time somebody has to lose. Finally we are all caught up in it until we run out of new players.

When you play Empire this happens every time it's been tried:

       ClubOrlov: Social Collapse Best Practices

First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly!

So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier.