The problem is the line of people between the general public and the rich tend to be paid off by the rich to ignore their crimes.
See the Supreme Court that is lecturing US citizens on why they don’t need ethics rules and why it’s totes okay for them to take gifts from billionaires, one of which happens to be the husband of the person in question of the linked article.
People think Elon Musk is an idiot (he is, but that’s beside the point I’m making) because he acts like the rules don’t apply to him.
The thing is, for the most part, they don’t. He breaks the law with abandon because he knows he can get away with it and what punishments that can and will be handed down to him will be so miniscule that he can hand-wave them away each time he’s faced with them.
In other words, part of the reason people like this are grand fucking idiots is because they’ve literally had no pushback, like ever, for their fucking chicanery.
What’s really funny is that you can actually replace the name “Elon Musk” in my first sentence with a litany of other names “Donald Trump,” “Rudy Giuliani,” and so on. There really is a whole swath of society who are the biggest fucking morons you will ever meet because they’ve been completely enabled by a system that refuses to punish them because they have money.
Arguably, the worse and more brazen issue is another nail in the coffin of “these motherfuckers are absolutely stupid as shit” because they think we can’t see through their charade and how much more out-in-the-open their corruption is now. They’re not even hiding it.
Almost everywhere in this country the city officials are in bed with the local police. Sometimes literally.
I live in the northwest, in a very progressive city. Quickly after the murder of George Floyd the city council tried to act like they gave a damn and claimed to have a plan on the way to prevent local police from using tear gas at protests. Then the George Floyd protests got bigger, which made city officials nervous, so they took it back, because they wanted the police to have bigger guns to protect themselves from unhappy citizens.
City officials are always way more willing to let the cops brutalize the citizens as long as it means some cops protect them from the citizens they claim to represent.