Unfortunately, with political bribery fully legalized, there really isn’t another recourse that will effect the status quo. You can always count on the kind of people who seek power in the first place to be greedy and corruptable, and when the wealthy can just “donate” to their Pacs to mandate their will, no amount of shaming, protest, or honorable vibes can overcome that.
So either all the peasants who own almost nothing relative to the owners…
…can start GoFundMes in a hopeless attempt to out-bribe our elected officials, or we can revolt, that thing that’s too unseemly for you to consider. And reminder, sanctioned “protest,” with a permit from the bribed politicians, at a designated non-disruptive protest location, at designated protest times, isn’t protest at all, it’s as productive as masturbation.
Or third choice and the one we’ll almost certainly choose: jack shit nothing as the circumstances for most continues to decline until societal collapse in a generation or two due to greed driven ecological collapse.
I do think you’re a bit pessimistic here - great change is still possible through a combination of leverage and the iron law of institutions. Just as the implicit threat of violence caused the creation of the modern welfare state, and the destruction of explicitly racial laws during the Civil Rights movement, so too can this be defeated. All it takes is growing discontent and disorder, combined with the ambitious, to restructure a society, even radically so.
Of course, such is also a game of chicken, with each side daring the other to swerve first, and the best way to win a game of chicken is to prefer collision to swerving…
